Traffic bots are like LDL Cholesterol

There is no business ethics or honour in SL right now.

To suggest, as some have, that excellent content creators should degrade themselves, lose their honour and intergrity and start lying, cheating, spamming, traffic botting etc is an absurdity and it’s even more absurd to call this marketing and promotion. It’s not promoting it’s lying and cheating.

It’s not a coincidence that those who do make excellent content may be the ones who do actually have honour and integrity and are hence reluctant to use such methods placing good honest content creators at a great disadvantage

1. Search All is spammed to death and is a lie
2. Search Places is traffic botted to death and is a lie
3. Today’s Popular at Xstreet is gamed beyond belief and is a lie

It’s unfortunate that good ideas like search ALL and PLACES are corrupted by the dishonourable and make no mistake that these same people have low quality content and ethics that degrade SecondLife™

For a platform that has as one of it’s intentions and I quote from the Linden Labs™ web site -
‘ It's our mission to connect us all to an online world that advances the human condition ‘.

It’s a tragedy on an epic scale that so much lying and cheating and gaming of the system exists in this virtual world which has so much potential.

It doesn't have to be this way. Linden Labs™ have the power to change all of this

I am saddened by the present conditions

Being a favorite is irrelevant. We were talking about the quality of the creations and not the popularity.

Presumably you are talking about the Places tab search, in which case it's the way the system works that puts wrong places into the results.

I've never done anything other than using the search systems.

Yes I do consider my stuff to be excellent in its field. But you should be asking other people - not me. If you don't want to ask around, you could always search this forum - there are plenty of commendations for my stuff here.

Yes it is what successful "search" marketing is about these days, and it is what makers of excellent products should be doing now.

It wasn't always like that with the All search but it developed that way. My HTML page was really good and informative. It still has some informative quality about it but that had to be reduced in order to keep up with the tend. The keyword spamming became so bad that I wrote to LL about the situation and suggested an alternative. We had a thread about it all - perhaps you remember it. Many HTML pages became useless for people. Some tried to maintain some useful information but others completely abandoned the idea of being informative. It meant that places had to follow the trend or drop down the rankings into oblivion.

Having said that, I don't know what the situation is now as I lost interest quite some time ago. I haven't even looked at search in months.

Okay, do you think the top results are high-quality?



No, I'm talking about the "all" tab. It lists a mediocre *furniture* store five times before it lists any of the popular hair stores, when you search for hair.



So when you say "creating excellent stuff is no good at all unless it is marketed", the only personal experience you have with marketing is in manipulating search results?



If I may be frank, your stuff is pictures of furniture on prims, downloaded textures on prims, and copyrighted artwork you've admitted you don't have authorization to sell. In prim efficiency you may sell things that are of value to people, but you are precisely the low-effort kind of merchant I refer to when I say that the best that is available is not at the top of the search results.

I've no idea - I haven't looked. I correctly pointed out that there is no corelation between those who manipulate the rankings, those who don't, and the quality of both of their creations. I know it wasn't you who said it, but the idea that ranking manipulators necessarily make inferior products is plain nonsense. There is no reason whatsoever to link search manipulation with product quality.

Then perhaps the furniture place is intentionally spamming that searchterm - with 5 seperate parcels. If that's the case, then it's really bad, and I would applaud it if the furniture place was banned from search altogether.

The only experience I have with SL marketing is the manipulation of the search results and the encouragement for people to add my place to their Picks (you've seen that). Those 2 marketing things are all I've needed, and what I said (that you quoted) is correct.

I don't know any way to make furniture other than to put uploaded textures on prims. I don't think people would buy the default wood texture for their furniture. In fact, I don't know any furniture that isn't made the same way as there is no better or other way of doing it. To be honest, I've no idea what you are trying to say here. Perhaps you would like to explain it, because I don't think anyone else could understand what you're trying to say either.

ETA:
Another way of making furniture just occured to me - remove the default texture and just use colors, shine, etc. Some parts of furniture are done that way, but I don't think it would be very popular to make whole pieces that way - it would be much inferior to using uploaded textures.

Well I don't want to get into an argument about what is or what is not quality furniture, but I do completely understand what Anya is taking about. There are better ways of making furniture with textures made specifically for the intended design. However, I do realise making good quality 'low prim' furniture isn't as easy as making, say a chair look good with twice the prims.

Yes but it's still uploaded textures, which Anya seems to think isn't good. Better furniture can be made with more prims, as you said, which is why, in answer to her question, I said that I consider my stuff to be excellent "in its field".

I've squeezed a possible meaning out of that so I'll take a stab at it...

Yes, my furniture is made from pictures of furniture on prims or to be more precise, pictures of furniture parts on prim faces. Significant time was spent on the positioning of the textures so that the prims' sharp is completely hidden; i.e. you can't normally see the right-angled sharp edges of the prims because the eye is deceived by the finely adjusted positions of the textures. I would agree that some creators don't go to those lengths and their furniture looks like right-angled blocks with patterns on the faces, but I haven't said that poor quality furniture doesn't exist in SL.

If you imagine that my furniture is merely photos thrown onto prim faces, then go back and look again. I've always said that textures are the soul of good furniture, and that means using the textures well. Go and have a look in my store and see for yourself. If you can come up with a way of making such excellent furniture with so few prims I'll bite my tongue and take my hat off to you.

It is possible to use a lot more prims to make finer furniture but it's not possible to make better representations of RL furniture than the actual photographs themselves. There is nothing better than photos of actual RL furniture because it includes such things as highlighting, grading into dark places, etc. For instance, it is possible to make a cushiony leather back of a chair by using many prims, each with a little bit of a cushiony leather texture on it, which would still need to be uploaded btw, but the result would not be anywhere near as good as a photograph of the whole back on a prim face.

But to get back on topic (I think), there is no reason whatsoever to link search manipulation and the quality of products. My products and my search activities constitute a good example of that.

Marketing 101

1) Separate your store into parcels with themes - use different keywords for each parcel - use them effectively - tweak them until you get them right. You will know if they are "right" by watching traffic counts each day.

2) Label all your products effectively. Max out BOTH description lines. First line - your store name in a 3 or 4 letter abbreviation, so they can consistently find it in their inventory, plus The Green Sofa becomes the Contemporary Avocado Green Suede Sofa Couch Walnut Brass Metal Trim - 2nd line - your store name in full, description of the section of the store that this item is located in. Store name - Low Prim Contemporary Furniture - Modern Suede Sofas - Contemporary Sofas - Contemporary Couches.

3) The more product lines the better - the more product the better. The more product on the floor - the more keywords to be picked up in search. The more different styles - the broader the market, the more likely a search hit.

4) Build your group. Half or more of all your sales could be here. If you run a sale, 20 people out of 100 may make an actual purchase. If you have 400 in group, that would be 80 - keep multiplying.

5) A 150L Classified can get you on front page highlighted next to a bot runner with the right keywords. Run 10 of these a week - you've got 10 good placements. Each ad should bring you a bare minimum of 20 new people a week - if not, rewrite the ad until it does. You can watch the traffic from this ad on your profile. These are shoppers, not hit and miss visitors - they wanted something specific - they are ready to buy.

6) Xstreet presence required. The more product - the more hits to other product. Half of your traffic could come from here. A Featured Ad might double the traffic to your item page - they may find something else to purchase other than what was featured. Same thing with traffic to store. Some of your products might require a store visit.

7) Blog presence. A good blog can bring you as much traffic as an Xstreet or a classified ad. Swap links to other good blogs. You can track traffic from a blog to your store, by checking your blog stats, on how many clicked the slurl.

Forum Ads - free - at least one per week - one in new product section - one in sale section - a minimum of 30 new visitors for the week.

9) Cross Marketing - coordinate with another store on a group promotion. You have the potential to reach another 500 people with a click of the button in one instant. More, depending on the group size. Cross promotion with 6 stores - do the math.

10) Good Customer Service will keep a customer - even in SL - keeping a customer is less expensive and more productive than going after 100 new ones. This one good customer will bring you a dozen more.

11) Longevity. The more product you have sitting out in SL - the more people that will keep clicking on that product and end up at your store. Make sure you have easy access to your store on your profile - make sure your store is not hidden in pics among a dozen others - make it clear.

12) Gifts - give Gifts or Gift Cards. Many people do Freebies. Gifts are special. Gift Cards allow them to get what they want - not what you force upon them. If you give them what they want - it will sit out or be worn in SL and not sit in inventory. Give these away at club promotions or donate to charity events.

13) Promotions to Group. You can triple or quadruple a week's sales with one promotion. Directing toward group members rewards them for staying in group - you need to keep them, they are at least half of your business.

14) Say Thank You. If you are online when a sale hits - grab their profile, and send them a Thank You. They will come back the next day - guaranteed - and they will also give you compliments and feedback immediately, which will build your business without guessing every day.

15) Find a store mentor. Connect with someone to brainstorm with on a daily basis. Swap Ideas. They are doing something effective that you never thought of - and vice versa. Coordinate with them on consistent cross promoting.

16) 100 other things that are very specific to your own type of business. Experiment and figure those out.

Those are the very basics. Some things were left out, such as store pics in profiles and group inviting - midnight madness - lucky chairs, etc. to avoid an ethical discussion. hehe

But....you do the above in the right way....ethically....and you treat people like solid gold....you're cool in anyone's mind - you go right ahead and promote store pics and ignore the people sitting on their ass doing nothing. You go right ahead and send out those group invites, too.

Keep yourself busy with the above.....and you won't have time to worry about who is using bots....and you will stop worrying about them, as your sales start rolling in, you will realize that they do not have an impact on your business.

YOU are the one that makes an impact on your business. Not anything bizarre or annoying that is going on in SL at the moment.

No, I said *downloaded* textures.

Phil, thanks for your thoughts on the matter. I've seen furniture I like a lot better, more nicely presented, and some of it isn't very high-prim. I'd post links, but that'd require finding them again, and that can be a chore, as I've been trying to say

IMO when a newbie looks for furniture it'd be better for the platform if he found the best available, so he knew what's possible, rather than what's cheap and simple. I want him to think of SL as a place where you can create (or buy) very nice things. It may otherwise fail to live up to his expectations for what a 3D environment should look like in 2009.

Alright, I give in. Ah wait. You mean downloaded from the web. My best selling furniture is from my own RL sofa - not downloaded at all. But most of my textures are from the web. Does that make them inferior quality? Does it make the furniture inferior quality? The answer to both questions is no. You may not like people using images from the web but that has nothing at all to do with the quality of the SL furniture that they are used for.

Different people have different tastes - that's normal. For that reason, it isn't really possible to say which is the best - and I haven't said that mine is the best - I said that it is excellent in its field. Where did the people who made your prefered furniture get their textures, btw?

Ah but what you want is one thing and what other people want is something else. If you are really so keen on noobs quickly finding what *you* consider to be the best, then perhaps you ought to tell the makers of those products what to do so that noobs can find them easily. What you can't reasonably do is tell makers of other products to stop promoting their stuff as much And don't forget that noobs don't care where the textures came from, so the "download" bit seems to have been a red herring.

So, to get back to where I came into this thread, there is no corelation between product quality and ranking manipulation - they are not related. Makers of quality stuff both manipulate and don't manipulate the rankings, and the same is true of makers of lesser quality stuff.

I'm pretty upset over this change. I've used camping bots.. yes, but the change in policy is not why I am mostly upset. It was an unrealistic thing, yes, however I'm infuriated in which they have changed their TOS again without properly addressing residents and most importantly the people who use or used them. I don't read the SL blog and don't plan to, but policy changes really should be addressed to residents via email.

I read the first few pages to this thread and I'd have to say the following:

You can't compare RL business to SL business due to the vast difference in the two. The small, unexplained, and easiest statement to prove this is 'You can fly in SL.'

There is no limit to the amount of resources in the game meaning there is not a realistic supply and demand and comparing any sort of ingame demand to this for a popular clothing item is an entirely different thing.

Stick with the basics on bot bashing though if your really going to. Comparing it to RL business and ignorantly claiming 'bots lag!@1' etc etc is insane. Bots are just like avatars in 'lag' in that if you aren't wearing anything or not even rezzed by using a Sleek client for example, the agent is generating such a small amount of lag it is not noticeable. On a sim populated or not the only thing an avatar like this is doing is claiming an agent slot.

What is done is done, but like I said I'm pissed I got the email below versus a proper notification of a policy change. If I would have received an email stating the policy change and its effective date I would have stopped then and there and as you can see it happened today so yes, this was my way of hearing about this.

Warning or Suspension of Your Second Life Account

Dear DeeJay Kamachi,

This email is notification of action regarding your Second Life account,
DeeJay Kamachi, for violation of the Second Life Terms of Service or
Community Standards. The violation in question occurred on August 13, 2009.

I'm sorry this has happened to you. And I agree that LL does a miserable job of getting out the word about policy changes. But you, as an SL business person...in fact, simply as an SL resident...have a duty to keep yourself informed of things affecting your world.

ESPECIALLY because LL does such a wretched job of getting the word out.

Read the Forums. Read the Blog. Stay sharp, because you are NOT going to be spoonfed by LL. Consider them to be actively out to keep you in the dark, and Take Steps to keep yourself informed.